Going on a Journey

Tue 2 Jul 2013

Thanks to everyone who came along to TOTs on Saturday, we had a great time and very much enjoyed taking you on our musical tour of Europe. Below you’ll find a full list of the music included in the concert. See you next time!

Sat 27 Apr 2013

OAE Tots go Strings: what you heard

Mon 15 Apr 2013

We had great fun in our OAE Tots go Strings concert on Saturday and hope you did too. If you’d like to know a bit more about what we played, read on:

Most of our concert was made up of Telemann’s Don Quixote pronounced ‘Don Keyshot’. See what we did there with our donkey theme! This is a wonderful suite (collection of short pieces) by Telemann based on the 17th century Spanish story. A while back, Richard Strauss was credited with writing programme music depicting stories in music, but you can see Telemann was at it about 200 years earlier.

This story is about the adventures of Don Quixote on his horse Rosinante, accompanied by his peasant squire Sancho Panza on his mule (that donkey theme again). Telemann’s pieces are titled Overture, The Awakening of Don Quixote, His Attack on the Windmills, His Amorous Sighs for Princesse Dulcine, Sancho Panza is Mocked (tossed in a blanket), The Gallop of Rosinante, The Gallop of Sancho Panza’s Mule, Don Quixote at rest.

Donkey crept through the woods to part of the ‘Surprise’ Symphony by Haydn (second movement) and Teddy Bears’ Picnic was an arrangement by one of our own OAE viola players, Annette Isserlis.

The presenters for this concert were Cecelia Bruggemeyer and Susie Carpenter-Jacobs. And special thanks to our very willing and enthusiastic Education Officer Ellie Cowan, for her donkey work.

We look forward to seeing you again at future events. Check out our Education pages for events coming up soon.

Canary Competition (win tickets!)

Thu 22 Dec 2011

This New Year we’re at our Kings Place base, performing two concerts to mark the end of 2011 (on 31 Dec at 6pm and 1 Jan at 1pm). The programme contains Vivaldi’s evergreen Four Seasons, but also one real curiosity, Telemann’s Canary Cantata. The piece was written as a tribute to Telemann’s pet song-bird, and its full title is ‘Cantata of funeral music for an artistically trained canary-bird whose demise brought the greatest sorrow to his master’. They were obviously very close! To make it even worse the beloved bird was murdered by a cat rather than dying of natural causes

Here’s a taste of the piece, in this English translation of one of the arias in the cantata:

“O woe! o woe! thrice woe! My songbird is no more; To whom can I my loss deplore to whom can I my painful heartache declare? Who will now with me my sorrow share”

Plus if you have Spotify you can listen to it here.

We have two tickets to give away to the New Years Eve performance of the concert (details here), which is at 6pm at Kings Place, London.

To be in with a chance to win, simply tell us about your favourite pet, and what you did, or would do, to mark their passing in a fitting style. Add your entries below by midday on 29 December and we’ll announce a winner shortly after.